How to: create a real ghost

In this tutorial we’re going to see the easiest way for doing a simple and nice effect, making disappear the charachter under the sheet, in order to give the illusion to see a real ghost.

First of all, here what do you need:

a sheet (possibly as long as possible, in order to cover all the person),

a camera (it’s not required a good quality), you can also use a phone camera as long as you can fix it in a stable way,

a tripod,

a wide angle lens (I used a 12-24),

Adobe After Effects

Are you ready to start shooting?

well,but before to introduce your characters is very important to record the set without them, in order to use it later as a background.

Keep the tripod where you did the background shooting and keep on shooting with the characters.

So, lets go to After Effects!

now you can start the post production, creating two layer, one for the background and one for the main clip.

After that, create a mask with the pen instrument, and then activate the clock and modify for each frame, the dimension and the position of the mask, subtracting the character under the sheet movement.

Lastly, you can add a camera in order to simulate a movement that helps to hide the effects and for the same reason, if you are willing to lose quality, you can also export the clip in worse resolution (I exported in 960×540).